10 Years Later, the Hacker Way Still Rules at Facebook

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Facebook’s future is impossible to know. Despite stumbles including a botched public offering, some pundits predict it will become more dominant than Apple and Google; others predict that it will flail and fade away like America Online.

But today, exactly a decade since its founding, Facebook still demonstrates what it takes to instill and sustain a shared mindset even when its footprint is spreading like wildfire. We’ve witnessed their devotion and ability to grow and groom their people — no matter how wild and out of control the ride became — since 2006, when our conversations, interviews, and projects with people at Facebook began.

Bob Sutton & Huggy Rao

Named one of Businessweek’s ten “B-School All-Stars,” Robert I. Sutton is professor of management science and engineering at Stanford, where he also co-founded the d.school and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford. Rao’s previous book is Market Rebels. Sutton’s previous books include The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) as well as the NYT bestsellers The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss.

Once the company got too big for Mark Zuckerberg to personally influence every employee, it took to more systematic methods, notably “Bootcamp,” which is designed and led almost entirely by engineers — not the HR staff. Facebook engineers and other product developers are hired after rounds of grueling interviews to assess their technical skills and cultural fit. But they are not placed in a specific job until six weeks after coming aboard.

During Bootcamp, every new hire does small chores for a dozen or so diverse groups. Bootcamp isn’t just for figuring out which role is best for each newcomer. A more crucial aim is to infect each with the Facebook mindset, to live its most sacred belief: “Move fast and break things.” Bootcamp also instills other beliefs about what is sacred and taboo at Facebook. Engineers are expected to understand the code base, not just the part they tend to each day. Working on many different parts helps newcomers grasp the big picture. Rotating through many groups also sets the expectation that any role they play at Facebook won’t last long. After Bootcamp, these beliefs continue to be reinforced. Facebook doesn’t just tell new engineers that they likely won’t be in any job for long; they live this philosophy via a “nearly mandatory” program called “hack-a-month” where — each year — they are “loaned” to another group for a month.

In a classic connect-and-cascade process, each newcomer is assigned a mentor — usually an engineer who isn’t a manager — to help him or her navigate through Bootcamp. A new “class” of 20 to 30 hires was started roughly every two weeks in 2011 — which meant that 70 or 80 engineers at a time were pulled away from their jobs to be mentors. This sometimes slowed crucial projects. Facebook’s leaders, including Vice President of Product Chris Cox and CTO Mike Schroepfer, are convinced that it is worth the cost — that their enduring success hinges on filling the company with people who live and breathe the right beliefs. Bootcamp also helps Facebook scale up talent because it enables mentors to “stick a toe in the management water.” It helps engineers discover if they enjoy mentoring and leading others. And Facebook executives get useful hints about whether employees are management material.

But beliefs and behaviors aren’t the only thing that cascades during Bootcamp. So do emotions, especially positive energy.

University of Virginia’s Rob Cross and his colleagues show that positive energy is an especially contagious and crucial emotion for spreading excellence in social networks. They use simple questions to measure if a person is an “energizer” or a “de-energizer” such as: “People can affect the energy and enthusiasm we have at work in various ways. Interactions with some people can leave you feeling drained while others can leave you feeling enthused about possibilities. When you interact with each person below, how does it typically affect your energy level?” (The possible answers are: 1 = de-energizing; 2 = no effect/neutral; or 3 = energizing.) Answers to such “energy” questions predict employee performance evaluations, promotions, and the chances that employees will stay or leave.

Cross and his colleagues found that successful and innovative organizations have networks that are swarming with interconnected energizers. Their studies show that such networks hum along, in part, because colleagues seek more information from and learn more from energizers (compared to de-energizers). Energizers also are given more ideas and more help from others and are more likely to have their ideas heard and implemented. Energizers aren’t necessarily charismatic, entertaining, or bubbly; Cross observes that many are understated or shy and strike new acquaintances as dull. Yet as their relationships unfold and they reveal their true colors they create energy through their optimism about the possibilities ahead. Energizers also have a knack for fully engaging the person in front of them right now, valuing others’ ideas, and creating conditions that enable others to make steady progress.

In short, energizers propel the flow of excellence.

This insight brings us back to Facebook — and Chris Cox, whom one of us first met in 2007, when, at the tender age of 26, he was Facebook’s head of human resources. After talking with Cox for half an hour, Sutton realized: I feel so energized by his spirit and his ideas. Cox has wickedly strong technical skills; but his contagious energy is rarer and even more valued. As of last year, Cox was still giving the welcoming talk to almost every new employee, offering his take on the company’s history, strategy, and mindset, and transmitting that wonderful positive energy.

No single mindset is right for every organization, or even different parts of the same organization. What is sacred at Facebook can (and should) be taboo elsewhere. But to spread excellence, it helps to believe and live a shared mindset — and to hire, spot, and connect energizers.

Excerpted and adapted from the book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao. Copyright 2014 by Robert I. Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao. Published by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.